George's Art Heros .... Yoji Shinkawa

Konnichiwa!

Another post about one of my art heros .... This time it is it is the very talented Japanese artist Yoji Shinkawa.Shinkawa is most famous for his design and illustration work for the very popular Metal Gear Solid video game series.Here is a picture of him at his desk looking all cool:

(http://www.g4tv.com/g4archives/features/50164/The_Art_of_Metal_Gear_Solid.html)


He was born in Hiroshima, and began working for game developer Konami in 1994 after graduating from Kyoto Seika University.  He worked as an art director for  the game Policenuats, then moved onto being the character designer for the Metal Geor Solid series created by legendary game maker Hideo Kojima. He is now the lead artist on many of Konami's titles.

He is a very talented and unique artist. His weapon of choice is using the Pental Brush Pen. This is a Japanese ink cartridge loaded pen with a brush nib that is normally used for traditional Japanese calligraphy. Shinkawa though takes this pen and uses it for drawing his concept art. He will either just have the pure black and white line work of the pen, or he will more often scan a drawn picture into a computer and under paint it on Adobe Photoshop to give it some colour and tones. 

It is a very cool style .... here are some examples:

(http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/yoji%20shinkawa)

I brought a Pental Brush Pen several years ago, so I thought in tribute to Yoji Shinkowa I would give it ago and draw my own Big Boss from Metal Gear Solid in his style.

My effort:

It was great fun to have a go. However, I don't think I can master it quite like he does ... he is very subtle and graceful with it which is very hard to do.